Hey, good morning. It's Saturday, May 17th. I'm Ali Valshi. This week, Donald Trump

returned to the Middle East, looking less like the leader of a democracy and more like a visiting fellow monarch.

He was greeted with all the pomp and pageantry the Gulf monarchies could

muster, complete with red carpets, Arabian horses, swordsmen, and yes, a full parade of camels.

Very fancy camels, more than a dozen of them. The five-day tour, Trump's first state visit

overseas since returning to office, included stops in Saudi Arabia,

the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and surprisingly, he met with Syria's interim president.

The first time an American president has gone, has done that in a generation. Just as telling is where

he went, though. Normally a U.S. President's first trip abroad is always to its closest

neighbors and trading partners, Canada and Mexico. Biden broke ranks by choosing the United Kingdom,

but both of Trump's first trips have been to the Middle East, notably not to Israel, where tensions

between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seem to be brewing over his handling of Iran

and the Palestinians.

Accompanying Trump's trade caravan was a who's-who-of-billionaire CEOs, including Elon Musk,

Sam Altman, Alex Karp, Larry Fink. They were all seated at the same table as American officials

and Gulf Royals blurring the lines between public power and private profit. And the trip paid off.

Jointly, they walked away with more than $300 billion in commercial deals.

Headlines all week touted flashy investments and deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars,

but don't be fooled.

The real story is not the size of the deals. It's who benefits and who doesn't.

The winners were not generally American workers or small businesses. The winners were the

shareholders of big tech, fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, and above all,

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